The Psychopath: A True Story(23)
However, I had got to the stage that I wanted some emotional support as well as feeling that my children needed another living creature to love other than just me. After thinking long and hard about it, I decided to get a dog.
My sisters thought I was mad and on paper it does sound like just another mouth to feed and another body to look after. I was determined though and even moved house from the fairly comfortable flat we had been living in to a small flat with a garden because the new landlord would allow us to have a puppy.
I researched it quite carefully and although none of my children were allergic to dogs, I didn’t know if any of their friends would be. I decided to get a cockapoo because they don’t shed and so don’t trigger allergies. I wanted to make sure the dog wasn’t from a puppy farm, so I looked for one from a genuine home. I found a family in Sheffield that had just had a litter of cockapoos, and started to get photographs of my dog from the time she was born. As we waited the weeks until she was ready to come to her new adoptive home our excitement grew. We decided to call her ‘Honey’, partly because she is honey-coloured and partly so that when I walked in the door I could say, ‘Hi, Honey, I’m home!’
The day finally came and I travelled by train down to Sheffield, where the family met me at the station. The tiny ball of beige fluff was handed over to me and I instantly fell in love. The feeling quickly became mutual. All the way home on the train people came up to say hello. Honey was just too cute to pass without wanting to pat her.
She was so adorable as a puppy that when I would go to collect my kids from school, I would be surrounded by hordes of children wanting to stroke her fur. She grew into the most loving and lovely creature you could possibly want. A dog so devoted and sweet that she has become my constant companion, the love of my life and adored by my children. She follows me everywhere and gives me the most wonderful affectionate cuddles. If anyone were to threaten me or my family she would race to defend us, and I know she would never do anything to hurt or upset me. She is the ideal partner and what’s more, I don’t have to wash her socks!
GET OUT OF JAIL – FREE
I remember very clearly standing in my kitchen talking again on the phone to Victim Support in early 2009. I wanted reassurance that Will Jordan was still in jail and to find out how to petition to have him deported on his release. I had talked to numerous people by that stage and asked repeatedly what was going to happen without any definitive answer. The uncertainty was unnerving. Having told the whole world what he’d done to me and others, I was not certain how Will Jordan would respond once he got out of jail. Would he come looking for me and seek to punish me? Would he try to seduce me and suck me back under his control again? I was very anxious about both options. I also didn’t know how the children would react if he turned up out of the blue.
I worried daily that he might have been released early without my knowledge and that he could kidnap my young children and take them away. The other wife had told me several times that if anything happened to me, she would look after my children along with her own, which I found particularly disturbing. What if Will Jordan took my two younger children to her? Would the police even help me if he was their genetic father?
Only a few weeks earlier there had been an event when I couldn’t find ten-year-old Robyn after school. It had been one of the worst hours of my life. With mounting panic I’d asked teachers and school friends in the playground but no one knew where she was. I freaked out, thinking it was possible that Will Jordan had taken her or that he had arranged for someone else to kidnap her. There was a remote possibility that she had gone home alone, so I dashed between the school and the flat with my two younger children in tow, looking for her. She wasn’t at home. Frantic, I left the two younger kids with my neighbour with instructions to call me if she appeared, and ran full pelt back to the school. I was desperately clinging to the thought that Will Jordan was still in jail and it was far more likely that something mundane had happened. But my history with him haunted me and added an extra layer of panic. Back at the school the teachers rallied around and one remembered seeing Robyn with one of the other students and their mum at the gates so they called the mother. To my incredible relief, it turned out that the mother (someone Robyn knew well) had invited her over for a play date and said she would text to tell me but had forgotten to do so! I was not best pleased but recognised that the mother had not meant to cause me so much worry and it was a simple mistake.
Gripping the phone tightly, I heard the man from Victim Support say, ‘He’s going to be deported straight from jail back to the USA.’ I breathed a sigh of relief as he continued, ‘His legal wife divorced him in jail and he won’t be allowed to return to the UK . . . ever.’
It was the best news I had ever heard. I had been so worried about what was going to happen once he was released and free to do whatever he liked again. I felt like the huge weight that had been hanging over me for three years had suddenly lifted. Feeling like my entire country was behind me and telling this man he was not allowed to come back to the UK released me from my prison of anxiety over him.
A few weeks later on 29 April 2009, Will Jordan (at forty-four years old) was issued a passport for three days only. It was stamped with ‘VALID FOR DIRECT TRAVEL TO THE UNITED STATES ONLY’ by the American Embassy in London. On 2 May 2009, he was duly taken from prison in England and put on a plane back to New Jersey, USA, with only the clothes he had been wearing when arrested. I can only assume he went back to his parents’ house in Cherry Hill.